Conversing with antiquity

Ancient inscriptions offer a direct window into the human past. As invaluable historical sources, they preserve everything from imperial decrees to everyday transactions of ordinary citizens. However, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, their date and place of writing steeped in uncertainty. Reassembling these broken narratives is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, requiring expert historians to solve complex, localized puzzles of text, time and space.

For nearly a decade, we have partnered closely with epigraphers to pioneer state of the art AI tools for historical research. The milestones in this journey include Ithaca (2022) and Aeneas (2025), our generative models for restoring, dating and placing ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions. To place these capabilities directly into the hands of researchers, we previously built an interactive online platform at predictingthepast.com and fully open-sourced our underlying models.

Community collaboration has highlighted three main challenges for AI-assisted historical analysis. First, preserving explainable, flexible interpretations requires tailored visualizations for individual inscriptions. Second, advanced multi-text analysis must move beyond basic comparisons without requiring specialized coding. Finally, large language models must be firmly grounded in evidence and expertise to remain reliable.

To overcome these barriers, the Predicting the Past Skill for Google Antigravity shifts these complex computational workflows into natural language. By grounding Gemini directly in the specialized outputs of Aeneas and Ithaca, we have created an interactive partner that allows historians to attribute, restore, and analyze ancient texts as naturally as having a conversation with a colleague.

To demonstrate the practical power of this collaborative approach, we worked closely with Dr. Thea Sommerschield, a historian and epigrapher at Durham University, who has co-led all projects in this domain. Together we put the system to work across three distinct, real-world case studies that span the Greco-Roman worlds, show how researchers can now perform large-scale, interactive, and visually rich epigraphic analyses.

The Predicting the Past skill can help historians use advanced AI models through natural language and, by unblocking some of the complex bottlenecks, allows epigraphers to analyze patterns and produce visualizations in a matter of minutes. By bridging the specialized outputs of Aeneas and Ithaca with Gemini's interactive reasoning, this collaborative AI partner brings together multiple other tools that can now be directly integrated into historians’ workflows and help expand the boundaries of their research.